Top 10 Business Tips From This Week's OPEN Forum

No time to read this week? Here are our favorite 10 tips from this week's top OPEN Forum stories.

1. Reflect on past positive experiences with employees. Every person wants to feel valued for their contributions. Take it up a notch by acknowledging a past contribution from a member, advises Bruna Martinuzzi. "Taking the time to let someone know you still remember a past contribution, weeks or months later, and what it meant to you is fuel for the soul."(From "9 Ways to Have an Authentic Conversation in 10 Minutes," by Bruna Martinuzzi)

2. Create a holiday for your business. It's a great way to draw attention and positive associations to your business outside of national holidays like Christsmas, Valentine's Day or the Super Bowl. (From "7 Super Business Lessons From the Super Bowl," by Mike Michalowicz)

3. Encourage suggestions from your staff. Creating a company culture where employees feel safe offering their ideas on how to improve the company is a great way to find new ways to think about your business in a way you never thought of before.(From "6 Unexpected Places to Look for Innovative Ideas," by Dorie Clark)

4. Keep networking after an upset. Didn't win a coveted award or a spot on a blog's "best of" list? It doesn't reflect negatively on your company unless you let it. Use the minor setback as a motivator to find new opportunities to get the word out there about your business, whether it's guest blogging or adding one more networking event to your calendar.(From "What the Academy Award Snubs Can Teach You About Success," by Julie Cottineau)

5. Work with another company. Teaming up with a relevant company to bring added value to your customers goes a long way in securing new and steady business. Some partnering companies even take a referral fee if customers come to them from their partner business, writes small business expert Brian Moran.(From "7 Ways to Increase Sales in 2014," by Brian Moran)

6. Skip boilerplate questions in employee surveys. If you want to get dynamic answers from your staff, you're going to have to ask dynamic questions that really take into account the kind of information you want to be able to take away from the survey. (From "Employee Feedback Surveys: 5 Ways to Make Them Work," by James O'Brien)

7. Don't outsource your tasks to just anyone. A number of companies have sprung up in recent years offering freelancers who can take tasks off your to-do list for low prices. It may be tempting, but make sure the platform you're using vets its pool of workers before you send your business their way. (From "3 Tips for Choosing a Crowdsourcing Platform You Can Trust," by Ryan Frankel)

8. Stem a slowdown in business before it becomes a decline.You can reverse a drop in business before it gets worse by staying on top of indicators of growth for your business, says business consultant Ken Moll. "If you see a decline in new customers for several months or a particular type of product sale diminishes over time, that’s an indication of a slowdown, and it should be investigated so you can reverse the trend.” (From "9 Signs Your Business Has Stopped Growing," by Julie Bawden Davis)

9. Free up some time with free apps. Now you can tell just how much time you're not using to the best of your ability with RescueTime, an app that runs in the background of any of your devices. It then charts exactly how you're spending time on your device and suggests what you should cut back on to be more productive.(From "10 Free Time Management Apps to Free Up Your Time," by Vivian Wagner)

10.Take care of yourself. While experts haven't agreed on the benefits of pricey and intensive physical exams for executives, it does underscore a bad habit among small business owners: foregoing their personal health for the health of their business. Schedule an appointment with your doctor and make a promise to put your health first. (From "Executive Physicals: Can a $5,000 Exam Help Improve Your Health and Business?," by Mark Henricks)